As Russia flounders on Ukraine’s battlefields, the once unthinkable possibility of using nuclear weapons increases as President Vladimir Putin’s options for victory narrow. Tactical nuclear weapons have not been part of strategic thinking since the end of the Cold War in 1991. What are these weapons and what would be the significance of using them?
What are you?
Tactical nuclear warheads were created to give military commanders more flexibility on the battlefield. By the mid-1950s, as more powerful thermonuclear bombs were being built and tested, military planners thought that smaller, shorter-range weapons would be more useful in “tactical” or military situations.
Modern warheads have a variable “dial-in” yield, meaning an operator can specify their yield, and a tactical weapon would have a power ranging from a fraction of a kiloton to 50kt. For comparison, the gun that destroyed Hiroshima was approximately 15 kt. A single kiloton is equivalent in power to a thousand tons of TNT, a high explosive.
Tactical weapons should be used against troop concentrations, ships, marshalling yards, airfields, etc. During the Cold War, they were integrated into all levels of military planning by both NATO and its communist equivalent, the Warsaw Pact.
The Czechoslovak army alone had plans to use 131 nuclear weapons against NATO targets as part of its initial attack. Other Warsaw Pact and NATO members had their own plans for nuclear use.
Such an exchange would have rendered much of Central Europe immediately uninhabitable due to concerns that tactical nuclear use would very quickly escalate to strategic nuclear use, with most of the United States, Soviet Union, France and the United Kingdom all destroyed within space one afternoon.
Why would Russia use them?
With the stakes so high, why would anyone take that risk?
Russia has fared poorly in this war, the myth of its new professional army has been shattered, the country’s international standing has been shattered.
Inefficient, clumsy, and clumsily brutal, Russia’s military has another chance to reverse its misfortunes on the battlefield as a fresh wave of foreign-sourced reinforcements begin to make themselves felt.
If Putin cannot emerge from this war with what looks like victory, or there is an opportunity where Russian soldiers are generally routed, the chances of Russia using nuclear weapons to boost its status as a world power begin strengthen, to grow.
All tactical nuclear weapons are “strategic”
Most calculations of how the US and Russia would respond to the use of nuclear weapons have their roots in the Cold War and the delicate “balance of terror” that kept the world safe but in fear. The use of nuclear weapons was a taboo that had not been broken since the Nagasaki bombing in the closing days of World War II. During the ensuing Cold War, the seamless integration of nuclear weapons into all levels of military war planning and their use by both sides made the use of just one weapon the trigger for a global nuclear conflict in which the annihilation of all was “mutually assured”. .
Nuclear weapons were intended to deter each other from the possibility of large-scale invasions of Europe, the epicenter of the post-WWII Cold War. NATO and Warsaw Pact forces maintained a constant state of readiness should hostilities break out. This did not prevent the Warsaw Pact from crushing uprisings in its own sphere of influence, in Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968. Nonetheless, there were no major wars between the two blocs and an unsteady peace was maintained.
But with the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact at the end of the Cold War, NATO expanded eastward to include most of the former Warsaw Pact countries. The implementation of major nuclear arms reduction treaties has successfully reduced US and Russian nuclear stockpiles. Both possess only a fraction of the nuclear weapons once available.
Nuclear deterrence ideas and doctrines atrophied as the dangers of Armageddon receded. Budget defense funds were diverted to the sensitive issues of occupation and counterinsurgency and the so-called “global war on terror.”
Doctrine is useful, as are detailed plans, but in the worst nuclear crisis, when the US was confronted with Soviet nuclear weapons just off its coast in Cuba in 1962, all these plans were cast aside as they all led to one thing – global annihilation. Instead, intense negotiations, civilian back channels, last minute private assurances and sheer bluff between the two superpowers have clinched victory in this nuclear poker game with the entire planet at stake. This dialogue ignored military thinking and instead focused on the dynamic between US President John F. Kennedy and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev and their teams.
But in 2022, two very different people will be in charge, US President Joe Biden and Russian President Vladimir Putin. The questions are simple: would Putin break the nuclear taboo by using these weapons in anger for the first time in 77 years? And if so, how would President Biden respond?
So if Russia were to just detonate a nuclear weapon, say over a military target, would the United States risk climbing the escalation ladder by fighting back in kind, with global destruction awaiting at the top rung? President Biden recently signed a memorandum allowing the US to use nuclear weapons in retaliation for a chemical or nuclear attack. However, Ukraine is not a NATO member, so Biden would equally retaliate to protect Ukraine while taking the extreme risk of destroying an already war-ravaged country. One of the ironies of nuclear weapons, not lost on the Ukrainian people, is that not only did they not stop Russia from invading Ukraine, but the potential use of nuclear weapons actually stopped NATO from helping Ukraine get.
Russia has increased its nuclear alert, a worrying but not uncommon act in wartime. However, Russia has alluded to the use of nuclear weapons before. In 2015, she threatened to target Denmark of all places if it joined NATO’s anti-missile defense system.
With the war in Ukraine going so badly, the scenarios that President Putin might call victorious or successful for Russia are rapidly diminishing, and Putin’s political survival is now increasingly dependent on the outcome of the conflict.
Weakened leaders — with strong senses of survival, failing armed forces, and the country’s reputation at rock bottom — might be tempted to remind the world that while they may not have won this conflict, no one would win the next, and Russia might be down, but not from.